Quarantine Poems

Privacy is The room where you go to read a book you won't tell anyone about. Privacy is Active quietness. Strategic non-sharing so that you have a self. Privacy is Riding the backseat crushed up against suitcases dreaming of crushes. Privacy is A mental witness protection against random anger in your house. Privacy is A decision made two weeks ago that you are just now declaring. Privacy is Property. Privilege. Pregnant. Personal. Power. Primary. Precious. Privacy is A home. Acting with out advertising. Leaving the record to chance.

How quickly my words disown me. I perceive them as defiant trees. There are so many of them. They outnumber me twelve thousand to one. I am apprentice to their foreign eloquence. Still, they unsay me.

Whelked . Ridged like the shell of a snail: a whelked horn. Well kept. Rigged like the bell of a sail: a welcome form. Whelp'd. Ripped, like the yell of a wail: a yelp-mourn. Elk'd. Wrecked, like the fell of a male: an elk, torn. Held. Abridged like the swell of a tale or a bell cairn. *Dictionary.com word of the day May 24, 2020 Whelk Cairn

Driving during quarantine is like driving with a learner's permit or on breaks from college, exceeding the speed of walking, running, cycling - It shares in common with cycling and flying in dreams the big push, the lift - The road is a canvas that I keep to one side of. I could be pulled over for having more fun.                      * A September Saturday I took my sister's car and drove us north for no reason I could think of, except to go fast and straight. The road was straight and there were few cars. We passed farmhouses, tractors, the warehouse lawn littered with pools. I played you my CDs - You liked Crosby, Stills, & Nash. We stopped when we reached water: Lake Ontario and on the other side Canada. Wind and erosion carved me up in the way I wanted. For three years I made you copilot in my flights of fancy. I never promoted you.   Chimney Bluffs State Park with view of...

You still standing trees: You two with green fringe not yet succumbed to the swirling mad tangle below: Look to the right and left of you -- That clearing is not the work of men, not directly. True some traveler's heel carried the foreign seed that rooted there, making ghosts of your shadey friends. Those mounds are not some farmer's hay pile. They are all that remains of trees choked out, smothered, torn down like the statues of dictators in a people's uprising. ("Somerset Park," Philadelphia, PA.)

My highschool crush sang the Double-Mint Gum commercial to me from across the hall.            Double the pleasure,            Double the fun. Did he know who he was singing to? He called me "Double." I never asked you what he called you.                                                                                                           She didn't know who ...

Upon their                                                                          joy at                                                                                       seeing each                         ...

Every morning I defeat the urge to erase

A student wrote, I thought about this long and hard on my walk and I nearly cried at the sentence. I asked my students, "Ask a difficult question. Then take a walk, then answer the question." She did exactly that. She was eager to please. Her sentence -  it read like contrition for a wrong she hadn't committed. My assignment - a punishment I hadn't ordered. Did she enjoy the strenuous thought that followed close on the heel? Did she feel powerful? But not as I do, not as the teacher who only has to ask to make her students march.

I dreamed a friend entered my home                                                                                        And while I was sleeping made a dinner of baked salmon on toast                                                    with warm cream cheese. When I opened my eyes             ...

It is the great imbalance of our time that some families endure more loss, more fear, by far. Don't believe what they say: Viruses are not an equalizer. Injustice is the largeness of loss measured against the smallness of words -- The shock of news buried under the slow accumulation of time. When asked how her week was going, a teacher said "It was hard when a student told me he lost six family members this week." I had follow-up questions. (1. Whose week was this a story about? 2. Was hard a good descriptor? 3. Define lost, six, and family members . What could I do except accept her story? It was suspect. It was true.) But then the conversation resumed and I wished we could rewind to six.

I gather and weave dailiness into the fold of words and the first act of gathering gathers on itself. As I write this Frank sings about Kate Green's leaves. And now, there's another bud where once there was no green. In saying her name we conjure her as the ancients wished not to conjure bears. OED Etymology for bear : "Indo-European base of brown adj. , thus originally meaning literally ‘the brown one’ (compare bruin n. ), or perhaps < the same Indo-European base as ancient Greek θήρ wild beast (see thero- comb. form ), although some have objected to this on phonological grounds. The word probably arose through taboo avoidance (reflecting the danger posed by the animal)." An insight from Andrew Krivak, author of The Bear (2019) .

How         many                                      scrolls                                                     through the                                                                      ...